TEHRAN Former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, claimed that "Iran is threatening the region by building long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction."

Gold, who is a close aide to the Zionist hardliner and butcher of innocent Palestinians, Ariel Sharon, further said in Washington that the balance of forces in the Middle East had dramatically worsened since Israel and the Arabs first met at the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. Analysts believe that such claims are made in order to divert the attention of the world public from the massacre of the innocent Palestinians at the hands of the Zionist forces and the collapse of the so-called Middle East peace process, which was sponsored by the administration of the former U.S. president Bill Clinton.

The United States launched a disinformation campaign against Iran right after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, claiming that Iran was pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and that it was posing a threat to the regional countries.

By making such baseless claims, Washington managed for a while to distance some regional countries from Tehran. But soon the falsity of the U.S. claims were revealed to those countries, and they resumed their cordial relations and extensive cooperation in all fields with the Islamic Republic.

Today, there are friendly relations between Iran and almost all countries in the world, and no nation heeds the hackneyed allegations raised by the United States and the world Zionist circles against the Islamic Republic any longer.

Speaking in an interview with the daily Washington Post on Saturday, Gold also claimed that the former U.S. president Bill Clinton's Middle East peace plan, which calls for Israeli troops to pull out of the Jordan Valley, would leave Israel vulnerable to an attack by Iraq and Iran. He went on to say, "Iraq has escaped from UN weapons inspections and could be building conventional and non-conventional weapons. And Iran has recovered from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 and is building missiles with a range of 800 miles and developing weapons of mass destruction."

Russia has recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union and, since 1996, has been selling missile technology to Iran and challenging U.S.-Israeli policies at the United Nations, Gold alleged.

"The Middle East is a far more dangerous region than in 1991," said Gold, who is among Sharon's inner circle of advisers. He rejected Clinton's peace proposal as a "recipe for disaster" because it called for Israel to pull its forces out of the Jordan Valley in three to six years without considering the growing power of Iran and Iraq.

"If Israel evacuated the Jordan Valley, the only way to prevent the opening of an eastern front by Syria, Iraq and Iran would be for U.S. troops to be stationed in the Jordan Valley, a deployment "which would not be supported by those who want U.S. troops out of Kosovo," Gold said.

He added that the spirit of the Oslo peace process is "seriously questioned" by the violence that since September has left 318 Palestinians, 13 Israeli Arabs and 43 Israeli Jews dead. But, he said, "The Oslo agreements need to be implemented."

Gold said that a fundamental assumption of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord that a peace deal with the Palestinians would mean Israeli peace with all Arab states "turned out not to be true."

"There was no permanent revolutionary change. When Israel hit the wall [in talks] with the Palestinians," the wider Arab-Israel peace "collapsed like a house of cards," he added.